Promotion

Atonement director tackles action

I've heard quite a few times now from a few critics that they aren't totally convinced about Joe Wright and his directing prowess. Sure he has Pride & Prejudice, Atontement and The Soloist, but they are similarly themed films and these same voices are still to be convinced. Perhaps then his new project Hanna will be the one that puts them at ease, for it's far from his previous films.

It tells the story of a teenage girl trained to be a cold blooded killer who is only just beginning to find out the truth herself.

The story sounds interesting, and you could connect umpteen films and television series with the idea, but it does sound like it's going to be able to carve its own path and also give Joe Wright a new string to his bow.

He's currently in talks to direct the thriller currently titled Hanna according to Heat Vision through Coming Soon, who immediately connect a couple of film titles to the project to describe it, La Femme Nikita and Bourne, but then you could easily say Alias, Dark Angel and Leon and plenty of other titles on a similar vein.

The story will see a fourteen year old Eastern European girl who, for some reason is distant from her father who raised her, "connects" with a French family and forms a bond with the daughter and begins to experience life as a real teenage girl, instead of the one where she remembers with her father.

For some reason she is pulled back into the world she seems to have tried to escape, that of her father, and she discovers that she was actually bred in a CIA prison camp as a hardened killer. However she doesn't want that for herself and fights her way out to find freedom and return to trying to live her own life.

There are plenty of unknowns in there, and it's unclear how much she thinks she remembers from life with her father and if she only starts to realise what she is when she returns to that world. There's also the question of whether she was raised by her father at all, and if she actually had a father.

I have to say a clearer plot outline is called for. Seth Lochhead and David Farr worked on the script that Joe Wright is in talks to direct, and if he pulls it off it will be a strong move for the director from period dramas about relationships to something perhaps less intense in one way and more intense in another, all out action.

However there is a strong feeling in that blurb that there's going to be a need for his style and sensibilities on this project too, in that there will be a very strong central character who is going through emotional change and discovery, something that amidst the action is right up Wright's alley.